Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a maintenance supporting system and a maintenance supporting method that are applicable to structures such as an aircraft.
Description of the Related Art
In airlines, it is desirable that, when an aircraft is damaged due to a collision with a bird or a strike of lightning, appropriate maintenance is quickly performed to return the aircraft to service.
Information on maintenance of an aircraft has a very large volume, and thus systems that support the maintenance of aircrafts using databases have been proposed (e.g., Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2013-14152).
The maintenance of an aircraft is performed according to a maintenance manual. With the maintenance manual, maintenance information such as the necessity of repair and an applicable repair method is given in accordance with the form of damage, a damaged portion, the size of damage, and the like.
The damaged portion is minutely classified into, in the body of the aircraft, for example, a large grouping including a main wing, a vertical fin, a horizontal tail, the front side of a fuselage, and the rear side of the fuselage, a middle grouping in the large grouping including an upper portion, a lower portion, a left edge, a right edge, a front spar, and a rear spar, and further a small grouping representing more specific regions. The maintenance information is prepared for each these subdivided parts, and thus identifying which part the damage is positioned is needed.
Here, the maintenance manual has drawings on which boundary lines are drawn between the parts, but an actual aircraft body normally has no mark or the like indicating the boundaries, for the sake of appearance.
As a result, it is determined that the position of damage substantially corresponds to which position in a drawing in the maintenance manual using, for example, the position of a predetermined fastener as a guide selected from a large number of fasteners provided on the aircraft body, which is however not accurate.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time only to select the fastener.
In addition, in the case of an aircraft-body structure formed by fiber reinforced resin, the number of fasteners in use is small because the parts of the aircraft-body structure are bonded together. In such a case, no fastener as a guide of the damaged position may be present.
The present invention has been made based on the above-described problems, and has an object to accurately and quickly associate any position on a structure with a position in a drawing of the structure that is referred to at the time of maintenance.